Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Orion Armon, an attorney with Cooley LLP’s IP litigation practice, notes that companies in medical device, computer, networking and communications markets are busily patenting mHealth innovations, and that sooner or later, these patents will overlap. The result: nasty turf battles which cost everyone involved boatloads of time and money.

While the number of patent lawsuits currently being filed in these industries is nowhere near the levels seen in say, the smartphone and computer business, a few significant cases have emerged, Armon reports:

Robert Bosch Healthcare filed lawsuits against ExpressMD, MedApps, Waldo Health, and Cardiocom; and

BodyMedia filed a lawsuit against Basis Science.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Consider the patent ambitions of Airstrip, a tech vendor offering a mobile patient monitoring platform. The company’s President and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Cameron Powell, told MobiHealthNews that his company’s patents cover “taking any type of physiologic data—whether that’s from a sensor in the shoe, a home monitor, a blood pressure cuff, or a monitor in the hospital—and then re-rendering it on a native or HTML5 application on a mobile device.” (My jaw dropped when I read that one.)

Since that interview, Airstrip has filed a lawsuit against mVisum Inc. alleging that four of the other vendor’s products infringe its patent. It’s asking the court for an injunction barring future infringement, treble damages and attorneys’ fees. These are standard provisions in a patent lawsuit, but from where I sit they’re pretty intimidating, and if the injunction is ordered mVisum has a heck of a battle on its hands.

As provider interest in mHealth applications continues to expand, I can only imagine that the patent battles are going to get uglier and more widespread. It’s only logical, given the explosion of innovation we’re seeing in this space. But I do hope that patent wars don’t slow the introduction of new products too much at such a critical time in the mHealth industry’s growth.

3 responses to "Could Patent Conflicts Choke mHealth Growth?"

The Airstrip patent that is the basis for its lawsuit is a sorry pastiche of everyday programming activities, typical of software patents. Although I am neither a lawyer nor a mobile developer, I could see from reading the patent that it recycles trivial activities such as showing two lines on a chart at once, or combining text with a chart, and dresses them up with enough medical language to trick the patent examiner into thinking the application was something novel. I support the patenting of real advances in the design and manufacturing of devices, but most companies seem to find it easier to throw together well-established techniques and slide it under the door of the patent office.

Andrew,
Great analysis. Almost all software patents I’ve seen are a joke. I hope the open source stuff I’ve seen that works with the patent office and the new law that lets you look at past patents and prior art is able to make some progress on this front.